I recently heard that the Soviet Union sold significantly inferior weapons and equipment to their allies outside of the Eastern Bloc. Wikipedia says that 'the the model had the benefit of disinformation when an exported monkey model fell into the hands of Western intelligence, who "naturally gained a completely false impression of the true combat capabilities"' This seems like poor planning to me, was this the only reason? Wouldn't this significantly hurt the Soviet Union in proxy conflicts and wouldn't their allies outside of Europe realize that they were being sold inferior equipment?
I don't really understand the reasoning for this, maybe I'm extremely underestimating the significance of disinformation, but this strategy, to me, seems to hurt the Soviet Union much more than the United States.
Also as a side question, the Wikipedia article states that the Monkey Model was sold mainly by Egypt, Iraq and Syria. Is this one of the key reasons for Syria and Egypt's failure in defeating Israel?
Part of this stems from the Soviet/Russian experience in WWII, where they faced in many cases a technologically superior German piece of equipment and the desperate need for equipment "right now." The Soviets determine that say the German King Tiger was a superior tank, but could not be produced in numbers large enough to be effective, where the Soviets could churn out dozens of T-34s in the same time frame that it took to make one King Tiger.
The Soviets after the war designed essentially two types of equipment, let us call them "standard" and "monkey model." The standard model would come with all the bells and whistles (say for a tank a stabilized gun, night vision, advanced communication gear). This standard model was the peace time manufacturing standard, when time could be taken to make the best version available. The monkey model was a much simplified version of the equipment, designed to be produced very quickly and in large numbers during wartime. Since the Soviets determined from WWII that it was better to have a monkey model of a tank than no tank at all. So the Soviets effectively had two production lines running, one for standard and one for the monkey models. When given the choice as to which version to export, the Soviets made sure that the standard model tended to stay close to home, Red Army units and trusted Warsaw Pact forces. The easier to produce, technologically downgraded version became the export version as they could be churned out in large numbers for a relatively low cost, allowing for the Soviets to support their clients, while able to keep both lines of production open.
(Oddly enough, my answer comes from my copy of Inside the Soviet Army which is cited in the Wiki article.)